Two Major Announcements Today, here at RemObjects

Today is a day I’ve been looking forward to for a while. Why? Because today we officially announced two major projects that I am really excited about, and one of them is a project I have been working on for a long time that — as of today — is in the hands of thousands of Elements developers.

So First, Fire.

I cannot overstate how excited I am about Fire. I started working on this project almost two years ago, as a side/weekend project. It evolved slowly at first, and then began picking up speed and came to the point where — much sooner than I had expected — it had become usable. Late last fall, Fire was promoted to be an “official company project”, this spring, it went out to less than a handful of very dedicated external testers. And today, while still considered Beta, it’s being made available to every Oxygene and RemObjects C# user as part of their active subscription.

What is Fire? I am glad you asked.

Fire is a Mac native app, and it’s a place to go to cook up great apps. If you want to use less fancy terms, you could also say that Fire is a new IDE for Oxygene and RemObjects C# that runs on Mac OS X.

My reasons for starting work on Fire where two-fold.

One, I’ve been a Mac user for a long time now (since 2007), but I’m always keeping a Windows VM around to do what? To run Visual Studio. I really wanted to break out of that and develop in Oxygene (and more recently RemObjects C#) directly on my Macs. On my laptop, a VM is way too much overhead, so I never bothered installing one; but even on the desktop, it’s annoying to always have your IDE in a “box”.

Two, while I (kinda) like Visual Studio and love Xcode, I’ve had my own ideas about what would make an IDE great, and I wanted to put those in practice. For version 1.0 those mainly revolve around lightweightness and the IDE not getting in my way. Beyond 1.0, I (and all of us) have more radical ideas.

Fire is the fulfillment of both of those dreams. Since early this year, I have been using it exclusively for all my Elements developing tasks and — if you’re a Mac user — I hope you will be as well, starting today.

You can read more about Fire at remobjects.com/fire, and I’ll also be talking about it more, and going into features in more detail, in future blog posts.

Second, Silver

But just one announcement would be boring, right? That’s why we have two. Today, we also took the wraps off another project we have been cooking up — this one not quite so long, but for about a month and a half.

As you probably know, last month at WWDC, Apple announced Swift, their new programming language for Mac and iOS. We started digging into Swift immediately, and really liked what we saw. So much in fact that we thought about what would be involved in bringing Swift into the Elements language family as a third member. And we didn’t just think about it, we put Carlo to work on it immediately as well.

So today we’re pre-announcing “Silver”, which is our project to do just that. “Silver” will bring the Swift language to Android/Java and .NET developers (and it will work on Cocoa too, for completeness sake). In essence, any place where you can use Oxygene or RemObjects C# now, you’ll be able to use Swift as well. And it will of course work in both Visual Studio and Fire.

While “Silver” is already working pretty great internally, we don’t have a public preview quite yet — but we will soon. You can leave your email with us on the “Silver” home page (below), and we’ll keep you in the loop.

4 responses to Two Major Announcements Today, here at RemObjects

You guys are awesome at the technology you support & delivery and this is another way you’re delivering for developers and it’s a great step forward. I’m just a bit concerned at your market positioning and marketing activities to raise your profile, especially around the C# product which should have been a landmark arrival on the market but you seen to be getting your asses kicked by Xamarin whose offering is ridiculously expensive for small shops and deserves to be beaten in the market. I hope Scotty can get on it and start to realise the massive potential success that RO products deserve.

We’ll never be able to “compete” with Xamarin in terms of presence and marketing. They have major backing and are pouring millions into marketing their (as you point out more expensive and in several ways inferior) solution. So it’s just not something worth worrying about.

We’re very happy with the uptake of both Oxygene and RemObjects C# we see, even if Xamarin does get all the publicity.

Of course we do appreciate any help we cna get for getting the word out about our products — so make sure to help and tell everyone about it ;)